Fly Me To The Moon didn’t have a major box office run last year, but given it paired Channing Tatum and Scarlett Johansson, it was high-profile enough that a lot of critics weighed in before release. In fact, I thought I had a real idea of what I’d be getting into when I finally watched the romantic movie streaming, but it turns out, I had no idea at all what I’d signed up for.
Surprise, Fly Me To The Moon Is Only Partially a Rom-Com
Fly Me To The Moon has many of the hallmarks of a traditional rom-com. There's a meet-cute at a diner. It has two very important people who don’t see eye-to-eye but eventually unite around a common goal. A little bit of deep personality unraveling comes out as the characters get to know one another. Oh and the movie has some fun comedic cameos and side parts, notably a very funny scene from Johansson’s husband Colin Jost, but also good stints from Jim Rash and Ray Romano.
However, the thing that shocked me most about this movie is that it’s not specifically a rom-com, or at least not typically a rom-com. The main plot of this movie, actually, revolves around the 1969 moon landing and a simultaneous plot to film a fake moon landing in a top-secret studio on NASA property just in case things went awry in space. It’s a wild story and one that was definitely worth telling on the big screen, but it's almost like a rom-com was shoehorned in so that the entire movie could lead up to the ending, which involved the fake moon landing conspiracies and a cat that had been hanging about at NASA for weeks.
In actual practice, your bandwidth with this title might vary, but at least it never stops being interesting as the movie progresses.
I Like Channing Tatum Is Expanding His Repertoire, But Scarlett Johansson Does The Heavy Lifting Here
Tatum had an oft-discussed role as Gambit in Deadpool & Wolverine and then two underseen releases hitting the movie schedule last year: Blink Twice and Fly Me To The Moon. In both of the latter, he’s playing characters we don’t typically see him as. He’s a rich, rich man with a sadistic streak in Blink Twice while in the space-oriented movie he plays a scientist and boss at NASA who is not looking for romance, but it comes for him anyway.
We have seen Channing Tatum in rom-coms such as Dear John and The Vow in the past. I think people like The Vow OK, but neither have really stood up among some of the best rom-coms of all time. I was hoping Johansson would be the right partner and she shines here as advertising maven as Kelly Jones, but it often feels like she’s doing heavy lifting to make some sort of chemistry work between the two. Maybe I just don’t buy Tatum as a NASA scientist dealing with survivor’s guilt (or as a person living in the 1960s even with that haircut), maybe I didn’t like the feeling of watching two movies mashed into one, but whatever it is, there’s something slightly off about the final product.
One thing I’ve always liked about Tatum is that he loves hopping genres and types of roles and he usually does well within whatever he’s trying. I really thought Fly Me To The Moon would be one of my favorites of the year, but it wasn’t. It’s certainly not a bad movie or a waste of time in the least, and I’d still recommend it streaming, but there’s something about it I can’t quite put my finger on that keeps the movie from being a true knockout.
The one thing I will say is that I thought I knew exactly what I’d be getting into with Fly Me to the Moon when I threw it on with my Apple TV+ subscription, and I actually had no idea in the least. It’s not often a movie surprises me, and this one did from start to finish.
